We have watched the evolution of Oracle with growing interest ever since you took over PeopleSoft and with that acquisition became the owners of J D Edwards, a company which, as you probably know, has had a long time affiliation with our platform of choice, the IBM i (formerly known as the AS/400). Our interest was further piqued when, in January of 2010, Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems thereby adding hardware and operating systems to its product line.

We found ourselves wondering whether it could indeed be that at last a major force in the computer industry had woken up to the needs of small and medium businesses for an integrated solution. One that would let them focus more on running their business and less on managing their hardware and software stacks. One that offered the possibility of not only simplifying the task of database management, but of improving database performance by pushing more functionality down into the operating system layer. It certainly looked as if this might be in the cards.

Subsequent announcements from Oracle have clearly identified that this is indeed a major theme for your company and we're thrilled. In our opinion, far too many businesses have been taken for a ride over the past few years. The snake oil salesmen promise them a "modern" solution with lower cost than their current system. What they eventually deliver of course is invariably a system that requires two, three or more times the number of servers originally proposed, not to mention the increased staffing levels needed to keep it all working. Of course, by the time they realize the trap that they have been led into, most are too committed, or just plain embarrassed, to admit that they made a poor choice.

So why are we writing? We want to wish you every success with your new venture. The businesses of North America, and indeed the world, deserve better than they have been getting. If Oracle's integrated platform is successful, perhaps - just perhaps - IBM will realize that they too own such a dream system. Perhaps your success will allow them to see with new eyes the treasure trove that they already have in their own IBM i systems and join you in the quest of bringing sanity, simplicity and reliability back to the business community.

Competition is good for all of us. We wish you luck - and may the best system win.

June 16, 2011

This week, we're doing three of our favorite things. First, we are in Montreal, which is a city that we both love. It is also home to one of our favorite restaurants - Les 3 Brasseurs -- check out the website and you'll quickly understand why Jon loves it so much. Second, we are teaching RDP's Remote Systems Explorer -- one of our favorite topics. And third, we got to travel here by train -- which as we've said before has become our favorite mode of transportation. What more could we ask?

Today marks IBM's 100th birthday and there's been a lot of publicity about it over the course of this year -- including, of course, Watson's spectacular "Jeopardy!" win. IBM has been putting out a lot of material including videos of the history of the company and lists of its top achievements etc.

All good stuff -- until you realize that the System/38 (the IBM i's ancestor), a truly revolutionary computer architecture, is inexplicably not even on the list. It gets a small mention in at least one of the movies, but that seems to be about it. The IBM PC gets a lot of attention -- as indeed it should -- but it was hardly revolutionary. The IBM PC's story was a classic demonstration that it took the power of an IBM to bring standardization to an industry that was descending into incompatible chaos.

Not surprisingly the mainframe also gets a lot of attention -- but again, it was hardly revolutionary in the way that the System/38 was. It was more of an evolution of the systems that preceded it. Even the notion that the System/360's VM heralded a revolutionary change in operating systems would be hotly disputed by those who worked on the ICL George operating systems at the time.

Surely a solid argument can be made that the S/38 hardware and software architecture was not only revolutionary, but that the hardware abstraction concepts that it embodied (and which we still enjoy today) were the forerunner of the whole army of hardware independent virtual machines that we see now in the form of Java and .NET among others.

January 26, 2011

Sometimes we get so reliant on the technology that drives our daily lives that we can forget what a house of cards the whole infrastructure can be. We were reminded of this on Sunday evening when the power went out. Generally we're pretty lucky in this area and breaks in the power rarely last more than a few seconds until the backup grid cuts in. Even then, it normally only happens in extreme weather conditions.

Sunday was one of those rare occasions when the scope of the failure was such that the power didn't come back right away. During the period that the power was out, we made a number of discoveries (or perhaps rediscoveries in some cases):

Flashlights apparently get bored and go "walkies" when not used for a period of time.

Laptop screens provide excellent illumination that can be extremely useful while searching for flashlights!

Flashlight batteries do not last forever even if you haven't been using the flashlight.

Storing matches in the same place as the candles would, in hindsight, have been a good idea.

It takes at least 30 minutes before your brain registers the fact that none of the light switches in the house work.

The same thing that is stopping you from being able to use the kitchen stove to prepare supper will also prevent you from using the microwave!

Having gas central heating doesn't help when there is no power to drive the blower system.

When it is -4F outside (-20C for our non-U.S. readers) the house cools really, really quickly.

Having at least one phone in the house that is an old-fashioned wired model is a really, really good idea as while the wireless handsets are battery powered the base station needs power.

Your laptop may be fully charged, but the idea that you can still work on your e-mail, etc., will be short-lived when you realize that the internet connection isn't working.

At least one battery powered radio in the house should include the AM band -- it's really useful when the news-only stations in your area are not on the FM band and you want to find out how widespread the outage is -- remember we've already discovered that the internet was not an option.

It is only when the power comes back on that you realize a) How many lights you attempted to turn on while walking around trying to find things and b) How many digital clocks you have. Turns out we have 5 in the kitchen alone -- who knew!

You cannot use the internet to find out the phone number of the electric company to phone for an ETA of the power, so maybe keep it written down on -- heaven forbid-- a piece of paper, perhaps somewhere near the candles and flashlights.

About the time you finally locate and fill with batteries all the requisite flashlights, lanterns and radios and get the fire and candles lit, there's a good chance the power will come back on.

Last and perhaps most important -- taking a time-out from technology to huddle round the gas fire in the family room (what an inspired choice that now seems!) by candlelight is kinda nice. We may even do it again when we don't have to!

What has all this got to do with IBM i? Not a lot really -- but it did bring home to us the dangers of relying completely on technology -- no matter how reliable. It also served as a reminder that we should all take a break from our technology from time to time. Facebook, LinkedIn and even midrange.com will manage just fine without you for a while.

October 06, 2010

The last few weeks we've been busy with on-site training classes and user group events all while in the final stages of preparing for our RPG & DB2 Summit in Minneapolis. Once the dust settles on that event we're headed off to Manchester, UK for the one-day PowerShift event, followed by the two-day RPG & DB2 Summit France in Paris. We're looking forward to meeting some of our European readers during these events. If you're there, then please say hi--or bonjour, if you prefer!

The reason for mentioning this is as far as IBM i educational events go, the market seems to be all over the place at the moment. Some events are being canceled, others are suffering significantly reduced attendance, while others (and we're thankful to say our own "Summit" is in this category) are running at close to pre-recession levels. We've also heard this week's COMMON event in San Antonio has exceeded attendance expectations. Is it a question of the market being more value sensitive? A regional issue? Who knows. But it certainly makes it much riskier to plan such events now than it was in the past.

Witness the situation with one of the local user group events we spoke at recently. While talking with some of the organizers we heard what's sadly an all-too-familiar story. The attendance at the event wasn't what they had hoped, and the hard-working organizers were baffled by the lack of participation. The problem was they weren't sure whether the problem was the agenda; did it included the topics the membership needed? Or the price? Or the state of the local economy? Or ... It wasn't because they didn't care about what the members needed; it's quite the opposite. It seems they'd tried numerous attempts to solicit input on the members' needs via e-mails and surveys, but had received very little in the way of input.

This isn't a situation unique to this particular local user group. We've heard similar stories from around the country and the world. Organizers often ask for our ideas on popular topics and how to get input from their community. It's hard to know what to do if people don't communicate with you. If you're a member of a local IBM i user group, have you told the organizers what your interests are? Maybe you're thinking, "My local group hasn't offered anything useful to me in ages, so why should I bother communicating with them?" Perhaps the reason they don't offer anything useful to you is because they have no idea what you need. Local user-group leaders are no better at reading minds than the rest of us. Most of the time, they're doing the best they can with the information they have. Unfortunately, all too often, they have precious little information with which to work.

Perhaps you think your suggestions won't be welcomed by the group's organizers. While your mileage may vary, we've found far more groups who are desperate for input from the membership than we have those who prefer to work to their own personal preferences. Some local user groups still seem to be going strong and the members enthusiastically participate and provide input. If you're part of one of those groups, maybe you could help us help other groups by sharing your ideas on how to best solicit information from the membership.

Or is the problem that the day of the user group is simply over, supplanted by the Internet? We don't feel that's the case. The Internet can certainly provide technical information, but can it provide the interpersonal interaction we've always found to be so important in networking with fellow IBM i enthusiasts?

September 28, 2010

We’re self-confessed workaholics – one of us perhaps a bit more than the other. We’ll let you guess which one it is. Since we formed our own company, our natural tendency to work almost constantly has become even stronger. Fortunately, we love what we do – well, most of it! But it's still work and we've put off doing many non-work “life” things indefinitely as the ever-increasing workload occupies all our time. On the continuum of a scale where work to live is at one end and live to work is on the opposite end, we seem to have taken up residence on the live-to-work end lately.

Many companies and life coaches discuss work-life balance. Forget balance; we sometimes have trouble even drawing a line between work and life–they sometimes seem to just get jumbled up. We’re not convinced this is altogether a bad thing. For example, we've met nearly all of our best friends through work in one way or another. When we get together with them, it's natural that conversation--and sometimes even activities we do together--are work-related to some degree and we don’t see a problem with that.

We spent much of this past weekend with friends (who we met through work) who do a much better job at this work-life balance thing. The weekend started out late for us because work prevented us from arriving at their house as early as we originally planned. We also spent a few hours each day after we got there doing some work as well because we had too many overdue deadlines. But in between the work, we relaxed on a beautiful deck overlooking a peaceful wooded area. (Our own plans to create a new deck and outdoor oasis in our own back yard began more than five years ago and aren't much closer to reality than the plans that are beautifully drawn and now rolled up somewhere in the house.) Over just two days, we spent hours sitting in their hot tub listening to music (and decided we must add to our outdoor oasis plans space for a hot tub and outdoor speakers). We went kayaking on a nearby quiet lake. Susan, who has never been all that keen on most kinds of water activities, was finally convinced of the value of serenely paddling on a quiet lake enjoying birds and fall colors on the trees. To us, it felt like a vacation and it was just a weekend – and a short one, at that!

We’re pretty sure we’ll never get completely to the work-to-live end of the continuum, where our work becomes merely a means to fund other things. After all, we truly like our work and get a lot of fulfillment from it. But we have become reacquainted with the idea that work, no matter how fulfilling, isn't all there is. And we’ve been spending a bit too much time and energy on that one aspect of our lives.

So, we’re resolved now to re-balance our lives. It would be nice to get closer to the middle of the continuum between living to work and working to live. If any of you have advice to offer, please do. We’re not aware of any 12-step programs for workaholics, but we can certainly use the help of anyone else who has managed to overcome the work addiction!

September 14, 2010

I suspect we all have heard from time to time the gloom and doom stories of shops leaving our favorite platform. Recently, we’ve been hearing stories of the opposite, so we decided to share those with you, lest any of you begin to feel the platform is doomed.

The kernel of the idea to blog about this topic came to us a few days ago when we received a call from a company asking if we could provide basic IBM i and RPG training to a group of IT personnel because this shop is coming to IBM i for the first time. (We said enthusiastically “Yes,” by the way.) In and of itself, that call probably wouldn’t have struck us a “bloggable.” It wasn’t until we realized that this is at least the third such request we’ve received in the last 18 months or so that we suddenly woke up to the fact that certainly not all shops are moving away from IBM i – many seem to be moving toward it.

Admittedly, in one case, we were teaching new managers who were coming into an already IBM i shop, so that wasn’t technically an IBM i “win.” Or was it? How many stories have we heard about new management coming into an IBM i shop and deciding “old technology” must be replaced with a Windows or UNIX-operating system based “solution.” In this company, all new IT management who came into the shop kept an open mind when evaluating the existing situation and were amazed at the reliability and productivity of the IT infrastructure provided by the IBM i and its applications.

In another one of these cases, we were specifically asked to teach RPG to a group of VB developers. We weren’t surprised at all that they took to RPG like a duck to water. Of course, we taught the /Free format logic and we used RSE to edit the code. And the transition didn’t seem difficult for them. While there were many spirited debates going on for the few days we were there, we’re pretty sure by the time we left, there were some new IBM i and RPG fans in the making.

At that shop and others where we’re teaching RPG newbies we were reminded of the words from a high-level manager in Rochester, Minn. at a local user-group conference near Boston a couple of years ago who implied that no programmers coming to IBM i from another platform would ever learn RPG – they would only use PHP or Java. We begged to differ with him then and now that we’ve taught RPG newbies (programmers experienced in other languages – not kids just out of school) we feel we’ve proved our point!

What about some of the stories we’ve heard about shops moving away from RPG and IBM i? Just yesterday, we heard an update regarding the story of a company that decided to “modernize” by moving off the IBM i, to go to SAP on another platform. The new news is that after five years of trying, the move to SAP has been abandoned. They are now (still) running their business on IBM i.

But here’s what may be the most remarkable story of all. North American Construction Group was running (with difficulty, it seems) its business on the JDE Enterprise One application running on a collection of Dell servers running Windows and SQL Server. Problems with the application were rampant – outages were an everyday occurrence. A new CIO came into NACG and diagnosed the source of the problems and (long story short) installed an IBM Power 570 server running IBM i.

What we find so remarkable about this story isn’t just that the CIO was smart enough to see what (to us, the admittedly biased IBM i faithful) seemed to be an obvious solution to the company’s problems. What makes this story truly remarkable is two other factors in the story that we haven’t mentioned so far.

First, consultants came to NACG and helped with the new-system implementation. We’ve heard consultants are often not inclined to recommend the IBM i platform, we suspect because the system doesn’t require as much consultancy help as other platforms. In the past, anecdotal evidence is it seems to have been equally true of consultants from IBM. NACG used IBM consultants to implement their new IBM i based solution. Wow! It’s not clear from what we’ve read whether the consultants came on board before or after the decision to move to IBM i, but the mere fact IBM Global Business Services and IBM Gobal Technology Services were involved even in the implementation phases of the solution makes us hopeful that maybe IBM i has even made inroads into the consulting community.

Second, and this may well be the most remarkable thing of all, where can you read more about the NACG story? On an IBM website! It seems so rare to see IBM telling the good news of IBM i, but this is indeed really good news and it comes from a case study published on an ibm.com domain.

We must give credit to Chris Maxcer who first called our attention to the NACG case study.Thanks, Chris! But honestly, we had already planned to blog about our experience with training new IBM converts.Thanks to Chris, we were able to add the extra good news about the NACG story.

August 16, 2010

Well, we still haven't figured out a real use for Twitter in our lives, but Facebook has served us well in recent weeks. Jon's niece was married last Saturday in the United Kingdom and we couldn't get over for the wedding. We were able to participate vicariously in the build-up to the big day, however, by following the FB posts of various family members. We were even able to offer moral support and advice to the bride-to-be in dealing with a supplier who had still not delivered the bridesmaid dresses some four-plus weeks after they were due to be finished. Susan also continued to check FB long into Saturday night in the hope that someone had posted photos of the day. Of course, knowing them, they were probably still celebrating by the time she went to bed! Sunday morning, though, there was plenty of evidence on FB of how beautiful the bride looked. We're even looking forward to the promised posting of a video of our grand-niece singing to her mum to celebrate the occasion.

Facebook has also helped us reconnect with many old friends as we mentioned in last week's blog. We've also found out how to tell it that we don't give a hoot about our friends' activities in Farmville, Mafia Wars or any of the other myriad pastimes available via FB. As a result, the percentage of interesting posts that we see has increased dramatically. We'll be with FB for a while yet we suspect.

But, for every happy tale there is a sad one. Another close family member wasn't able to participate in the FB conversations. She has canceled her account because she could no longer stomach the constant flow of vitriolic attacks directed at her and others by a number of individual FB "friends." Sometimes it seems the more vehicles for "communication" we develop, the less civilized that communication sometimes becomes.

It seems to have become acceptable to say things via the social media that you'd never say in person--well, not while you were sober, anyway! We just can't see that as progress, but since this lack of respect for the opinions of others seems to pervade the media in general, perhaps we're the ones who are wrong.

The third of the major social media vehicles that we participate in is Linked-In. The jury is still out on that one. Certainly some of the discussions that have taken place in the various IBM i related groups have been interesting. But there are so many groups and they overlap to such a great extent that it's difficult to know which to look to when seeking advice on a specific topic. As a result, for technical questions we still tend to head for our old friend Midrange.com.

August 10, 2010

First, thanks to all those who commented on last week's blog. It's nice to know we're not the only ones who think using the language properly is important!

Second, an update on our July 19 post. As we said there, after contemplating and comparing various eReaders for more than six months, we finally bought a Kobo. As Ken predicted in his comment, we soon discovered that having one eReader wasn't enough. So we're now officially a two-Kobo family.

We did consider going with a Sony for the second one. We even put some PDFs on a memory card and took it into the Sony store with us to see if it handled PDFs significantly better that the Kobo. The results were decidedly mixed. One PDF document actually caused the Sony to reboot itself and it never opened it. Maybe it had something against RPG in V7.1? Another smaller PDF did open and was better than on Kobo, but still far from ideal. When we tried just a regular ePub-format book on the Sony, the book-load and page-turning performance seemed quite slower than we experienced with our Kobo. Then there was the fact we couldn't bring ourselves to pay about 35-percent more for the Sony in Canada than it would have cost to wait until our next trip to the U.S. to buy it there. Plus the Kobo was on sale last weekend and even without the sale it's less than the Sony, even in the U.S. We also felt happy to support a local Toronto-based company. So, our second Kobo is a very welcome addition to our home.

Our last topic this week is also one we've blogged about before. We have many fond memories of great times working at ITSO forums at the former IBM education facility in the village of La Hulpe, just outside Brussels. We're so fond of the place that, a few years ago, when we took Jon's mother and aunt for a visit to Brussels we spent nearly a day wandering around the village of La Hulpe and the grounds of the Chateau next to the old IBM facility. The former education facility seemed not to be in use at all when we were there, which we thought was such a waste of a beautiful location, surrounded as it is by the Belgian National Forest.

We recently reconnected, courtesy of FaceBook, with a friend who worked at La Hulpe back in the days when ITSO forums were there. She just told us that La Hulpe has been re-opened as a boutique hotel and conference facility called Dolce La Hulpe Brussels. We're very excited that on our next trip to Brussels, we may have a chance to stay in our old stomping grounds at La Hulpe. For those of our readers who stayed there years ago, you'll probably wonder, as we did, how they ever turned those tiny utilitarian rooms into what you see in the photos on the website; although their smallest rooms are fewer than 100 square feet, still far from spacious. Even so, clearly at least two of the old rooms with the minuscule twin bed, desk and space for nothing else must have been combined to make for these more comfortable surroundings. However, it looks as if La Cave (the bar) and the restaurant are similar to what we remember.

Of course, it won't be quite the same as gathering in La Cave with 15 -20 others, half of whom had been awake for the last 24 to 48 hours trying to get their workshop labs running!

Some of the special summer room rates are fairly good (by European standards, at least) and the surroundings are truly gorgeous. If you decide to try it out on a trip to Europe, let us know and we'll happily send you our own personal tourist guide to Brussels and give you pointers on some great restaurants in the La Hulpe area.

July 19, 2010

We just returned from speaking at the Ocean User Group's annual conference and were delighted to see an increase in the level of attendance. We suspect that in part this was due to the remarkably low price level that the group was able to achieve. And just how did they manage to do that in these days of ever-increasing prices? Well, like the Toronto User Group (TUG) we covered in May of this year, they switched from hosting the event at a hotel to using the facilities at a school, as did the MITEC group we mentioned in June. This seems to be a good trend.

In Ocean's case the school in question was a campus of National University. Because the majority of their classes are held in the evenings and on weekends, the Ocean folks were able to rent the facilities during the day at a very competitive rate. As an added bonus, they weren't tied to paying inflated hotel prices for meals and refreshments and were free to arrange their own catering. This resulted in better quality food at a lower cost. A win-win situation. Those of you who've never tried to organize an event at a hotel may wonder just how much of a difference something like this can make. Just to give you some indication--it isn't uncommon for a hotel to charge $50 or more plus an 18- to 20-percent service charge, for a gallon of coffee. That's close to double the cost of buying from Starbucks or other quality coffee establishments. Use similar figures for meals and snacks and you'll quickly see why it makes such a huge difference.

The Ocean team is a great crowd and continue to work hard to make the group both meaningful and affordable for their members, as indeed do all of the local User Groups we've had the pleasure of working with lately.

And the future is ...

We finally gave in. Well, kind of. Remember back in December of 2009 we mentioned an eBook reader was on our shopping list and we were waiting to see what happened to pricing. Well, the price point has finally dropped to a level where we felt we really should take the plunge. Of course, the number of devices in the market has increased significantly since we last looked, so we had to start the shopping all over again. In the end, although the price of the Sony reader we mentioned previously as our leading candidate has fallen by close to 50 percent, that was not our final choice. We went for the Kobo and so far are very happy with our choice. It interfaces with both Jon's Mac and Susan's Windows PC, and can handle PDFs as well as the major ebook formats. In Canada it's sold through the Chapters book-store chain and Walmart, and in the U.S. by Barnes and Noble, which is where we bought ours as they're running a $20 bonus promotion right now and were also offering five free eBooks. The eBooks work really well and PDFs are more challenging to use, but since most times we have our laptops with us that's a minor requirement. Jon has now read the whole of a Lee Child novel, a substantial portion of two Sitepoint technical books and various other bits and pieces and most of this on the unit's first battery charge.

It's not an iPad, but we long ago decided to wait until at least version two before we launched into buying one of those, so for now the Kobo will fit the bill. In fact, we may end up with two of them since Jon is showing no sign of wanting to "play nice and share."

June 30, 2010

When it comes to IBM i, we have many things we’re concerned about. We’re programmers and teachers, so our concerns tend to be oriented around those areas. As it turns out, we're not alone.

COMMON Europe organizes a "Top Concerns" survey each year and traditionally announces the results of the survey at its annual meeting. Even though the survey is organized by COMMON Europe, the respondents aren’t limited to its members. Our friend, Ranga Deshpande (who is from Belgium, one of our all-time favorite countries!), organizes the Top Concerns survey, but he worked with another friend, Ron Newman, to encourage participation from COMMON North America members. About 24 percent of the responses were from the Americas and 65 percent were from Europe, along with a few responses from Africa and Australasia.

So why do we say we're not alone in our concerns? Well, the concern that moved from fifth place last year to second place this year was "keep the skills current for existing staff." This topic is dear to our hearts! Not only is it in the list of the top concerns for IBM i shops, it’s apparently becoming more important than ever.

Too often we hear from programmers in IBM i shops they’re really struggling to update their skills, often with little or no help from their companies. We recently had a discussion with yet another developer who’s looking to pay for his own education on his own time because his employer can't (or won't) fit it into the budget or into the work schedule.

We’ve opined about this in the past. At each of the RPG & DB2 Summit events we've held to date, we've heard from attendees who’ve paid for their own registration and travel costs because their companies won’t pay. Sometimes they even have to take vacation time to attend because the company won't even allow the time to update their skills.

Maybe, just maybe, the concern about keeping skills of IT staff current seems to be rising to the top of the "Top Concerns" list is a sign that companies are beginning to see the value of education. We can dream, can't we?

Of course, this concern of ours is more than a little self-serving, since our primary business is education. In addition to our ongoing private, on-site class offerings and conference education (our own Summit conference, as well as participating in many LUG events), we’re just now embarking on what’s a new venture for us--we're offering some online courses this summer. If you're interested in checking those out, take a look here.

In case you're wondering about what the other top concerns from the survey were, here are a few near the top of the list. First was "satisfy internal customers," which makes sense, since our internal customers typically pay our IT budgets!

In third place is "attract the younger generation to IBM i on Power Systems (System i or AS/00),” which is also a concern of ours and one with which our friends involved with YiPs are helping.

There are 12 other Top Concerns in the survey, along with a few "write-in" concerns that weren’t on the list of concerns for voting, including "Modernize/webify/Native GUI applications" (apparently Aaron isn't alone in his concerns, either). Check out the entire "Top Concerns" list.

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